IN MEMORIAM: losing Henry

Last June, I welcomed an elderly fox terrier into my home to help out his owner, a lovely person who is struggling with serious illness. Henry quickly made himself at home in my house and my heart, as will not surprise those of you who met the goofy little guy. After two decades without a pet I had forgotten how lovely it can be to have a dog around. Henry was a lovely presence when I was at home, a lively companion on car trips to the post office and Humane Society Thrift Shop, and a sweet fellow to sleep with, despite his tendency to hog ninety percent of my bed and snore.


Henry was sixteen when I first met him; though he was extremely spry for his age I knew from the start that his "time" might not be far away. It came last Wednesday, when he went into heart failure and was put peacefully to sleep. My house and car seem painfully quiet without him, and the mere sight of his dog bed or water bowl can make me terribly sad. But even at my weepiest moments my strongest feeling is appreciation. My years of caregiving had tired me at the deepest level—left me wanting to be still and solitary and responsible for, and to, no one. Henry helped open my heart again. There wasn't a single day when the sight of him didn't make me smile, or when some odd little habit of his didn't make me laugh. He quite simply brought me joy, and that's one of the best compliments I can pay any thing or any being.

It's been said that the closest bonds are not always the longest; my time with Henry proved the truth of that adage. Maybe our time with dogs can't be counted in conventional human days, any more than their lifespans can. Maybe relationship of any kind must be judged by tenderness as well as length. No matter how you measure it, Henry and I had six great months. To misquote Hamlet: Farewell, sweet silly pup. May quires of angels sing thee to thy rest, and may heaven never run out of liverwurst.

FINAL WORDS: a Japanese tradition

The Japanese, who have traditionally looked at death very differently than we do here in the West, have a very old poetic form called jisei: the death poem. Usually written right on the verge of dying, jisei are in some sense a farewell to life and consciousness: the spiritual counterparts of the making of a last will, an important tradition in Japanese culture. Samurai wrote jisei, as did lovers who committed double suicide and people in a variety of other fields. But many of the surviving jisei we have today were written by Japanese monks, and their names, ages, and dates of death are recorded along with their poems. In the process the poems become the monks' legacies, lasting long after their lives, always quietly lived, have ended and passed into history.


The practice of writing a poem right during the act of dying sounds morbid, doesn't it, and also pretty strange? I can't imagine anyone here in the West consciously trying to time their death simultaneously with a poem, though perhaps we should try it. One jisei story tells of a man so preoccupied with making sure that his death poem was appropriate that he began writing examples when he was fifty, a full thirty years or more before he actually died. Maybe the challenge inherent in the project gave him what we would call a longer lease on life.

There is something moving about many jisei pieces, which are mostly in the haiku or tanka form. Some are haunting: A journey of no return:/ the wanderer's sack is/bottomless, wrote a monk named Kyoshu just before his death in 1769. The surface/ of the water mirrors/ many things, another monk wrote in 1825; still another, Boarding the boat/ I slip off my shoes:/moon in the water. Even in the awkwardness of translation, which can never hope to capture either the rhythm of the originals or their complexity of their imagery, they are hauntingly lovely.

But some jisei are wry and earthy. My only hope against/ the cold/one hot-water bottle, wrote Meisetsu; monk Raishi writes, You've done your duty/ till today,/ old scarecrow. A brother named Shiyo, who died at only 32, was downright sardonic--forgiveable, perhaps, in such a young man: Surely there's a teahouse/ with a view of plum trees/ on Death Mountain, too. Utsu, who died in cherry-blossom season, used it for inspiration. The owner of the cherry blossoms/ turns to compost/ for the trees, he wrote.

Whether they are sad or sardonic, jisei always seem to accept—or even embrace—death as a natural part of life rather than just an abrupt or unfair ending to it. That's a hard place for most of us to reach, but jisei let us spend a small, resonant moment there.

The poems quoted above, and many more, can be found in Yoel Hoffmann's lovely collection Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death.

RUMBLINGS OF DEPARTURE

I loved this small poem by the American poet Louise Glück. Called Departure. it shows us the briefest glimpse of a complex story without explaining what that story is. Yet the emotions, though evoked with indirection and subtlety, are clear. The combination of said and unsaid, present and absent, is often what gives poetry its resonance, and so it is here.


Departure
Louise Glück
My father is standing on a railway platform.
Tears pool in his eyes, as though the face
glimmering in the window were the face of someone
he was once. But the other has forgotten;
as my father watches, he turns away,
drawing the shade over his face,
goes back to his reading.


And already in its deep groove
the train is waiting with its breath of ashes.

The poem is reprinted from the poet's book The House on Marshland, originally published by the Ecco Press in 1975. (The always interesting Ecco is now an imprint of HarperCollins.) The book is now, sadly, out of print, though copies can likely be found at your library or bought on used-book sites like http://www.alibris.com/.

FORGOTTEN TIMES, FORGOTTEN REMNANTS

The news last week reported that archaeologists working at the Ground Zero site in New York have found a ship buried in the eighteenth century as part of the extension of the land in lower Manhattan. (Click here for the story as reported with the most historical background.)


It's not yet clear how much of the ship is intact or what its actual date and significance is, and though the details will probably be interesting I don't much care about them. What captured my imagination in the story is the layering of history of which the story reminds us. Cycles of birth and death, creation and destruction: that's always the way of things. A house witnesses births and deaths, celebrations and griefs. Land is excavated and built up, demolished and build up again. What once were roads become parks and what once were parks become roads. And a city landscape destroyed by one century's plane is found to be built on the remains of another century's ship, in a place another century's people were trying to make better use of.

There's nothing in this discovery that makes Ground Zero less stark or sad. (As a former worker there, I have to admit that I've never been able to visit the site since 9/11.) Yet it does remind us that change, of whatever kind, is part of the nature of things. We are all part of time's complicated layering, for all that we feel unique in both our accomplishments and our pain; and what we think is buried often rises again, in some other form, at some other time.

BIG PICTURE, SMALL LENS

Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron's little book My Mother's Clothes: An Album of Memories recently reminded me that we sometimes create the most vivid memorials to those we've loved and lost when we give ourselves permission to to notice small things rather than stretch for big meaning.

(If you follow my Working Writer Wonders blog, you will remember a recent post about the same book, in a different context.)

In her prime, Barron's mother Ellie was what we once called a clothes horse, a woman who loved exquisite garments and owned a lot of them. Later in life, as her memory began to fail, her daughter began to photograph her clothes to help spark recollections. The images in the book--of dresses and stockings, purses and bathing caps, hangers and size labels--thus have a double resonance. The project may have begun as an aid to the mother's memory, but in the end it also became a way to sustain the daughter's.

There are only a very few pages of photographs of Eleanor herself, and they come right at the very end of the book. But the simplicity of the still life photos and the very brief text Barron wrote to accompany each such a rich, specific picture that I barely noticed their absence. I felt Ellie's presence. I felt the pain of the absences her Alzheimer's and then her death created. I felt that in some way I knew Barron herself as well, knew some of the ways her personality was shaped in response to her mother's.

Barron makes no grand claims for her mother or her book, describes few of the details in a traditional biography, and offers few if any grand words about "big" concepts like values, legacy, or the meaning of life and death. Maybe that exactly why her lovely little work speaks so clearly...because it pays such quiet and devoted attention to the small choices that, in the end, comprise a life.

My own mom's personal style was completely different from that of Barron's mom, yet the book sparked so many of my own memories. If you're a daughter like me, I bet it will do the same for you whether your mother is living or not. Her web site is worth a visit, too; click here to visit the page where she talks about the book and its inspiration.

LITTLE, SIMPLE, WISE

In the period after I lost my parents, I found and bought some excellent books on bereavement and healing.

The problem, as I discovered, was that I couldn't focus enough to read any of them. Some of them sit on my bookshelf today, still unread. By the time I could muster enough attention to read them, I no longer urgently needed the comfort they had to give.

Much later, I came across a little book that seemed designed to accomodate that kind of difficulty. How to Survive the Loss of a Love, written by Melba Cosgrove, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams and first published in 1976, calls itself "first aid for emotional hurt (and a little second aid too)."

Co-written by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a poet, it describes itself as "kindly" and "companionable," and those words are just right. Rather than lengthy prose, it offers a series of small lists, focused paragraphs, and the occasional brief poem. I can guess what you're thinking: poems? Okay, let's be honest: these are not Shakespeare's sonnets. But even as something of a poetry snob, I think they make a real contribution to the book, creating yet another easy way for readers to recognize how universal their painful feelings are. Another useful feature of How to Survive the Loss of a Love is a series of brief suggestions about tangible things to do as healing progresses. I tend to approach "to do" lists with skepticism even in subjects less challenging than grief, but these were perfectly composed--wise, gentle, and reassuring whether you do them or not.

My copy came from a thrift store, and it looks as worn and well-loved as an old teddy bear. Many of its pages are turned down at the top, mostly those relating to forgiveness and rebound relationships. As I flipped through it for the first time, I wondered what had happened to its previous owner. But I didn't wonder why they read it more than once. I read it more than once too, and I've given copies to friends experiencing difficult times, too.

KAY JAMISON'S JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF

I first discovered doctor and author Kay Redfield Jamison when I read her first book, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. The memoir, told from the unique perspective of someone who both suffers from bipolar disorder and acts as a doctor treating those who suffer from it as well, impressed me deeply. Fiercely honest and fiercely intelligent, beautifully written and above all courageous, it is the kind of experience a good memoir should be, the kind that deepens our understanding of what it is to be human.

I just finished Nothing Was the Same, her latest book, and it has many of those same strengths. The story begins with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, before flashing back to their lives, their meeting, their courtship, and their marriage. They met in mid-life, and built the kind of marriage that can only come, perhaps, from that age. It is quirky and yet tender, romantic yet profoundly realistic as well. As I read, I felt the sadness of the passing of this exceptional man, yet I also felt buoyed by my meeting with him.

There were many passages in the book that I loved, but two stood out so much that I want to share them with you. The first comes from the beginning, and spoke to me in part because it uses the same metaphor, of grief as a landscape, that inspired my own Grief Country. Jamison writes:

Grief, given to all, is a generative and human thing. It provides a path, albeit a broken one, by which those who grieve can find their way. Still, it is grief’s fugitive nature that one does not know at the start that such a path exists. I knew madness well, but I understood little of grief, and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires, has its own territory.

At the very close of the book, she observes:

It is in our nature to want to hold on to love; it is grief’s blessing that we come to know that there are limits to our ability to do so. To hold on to love, I had to find a way to capture and transform it. The only way I knew to do this was to write a book, this book, about Richard. It would be about love and what love had brought, about death and what death had taken. I would write that love continues, and grief teaches.

Thank you, Kay Jamison; you are truly not only a doctor but a healer--sometimes a different, and often a more profound, thing.